The following interview is a conversation we had with Leif Magnuson, Co-Founder and CEO of TipHaus, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $8 Million Raised to Create the Future of Gratuity Management

Leif Magnusonf
Thanks for having me, Brett. Not a problem. 

Brett
Super excited for our conversation. Can we go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, yeah. So born and raised in Seattle, I was a terrible high school student. Spent too much partying and not enough time, you know, hitting the books. I got serious about things after I graduated. Went to community college, got my grades up. I went to a local college here called Western Washington University. Go Vikings. From there I landed on a degree called manufacturing supply chain management, which changed the course of my life, I guess. But it was a deep dive into lean manufacturing principles. Supply chain, the core backbone of many industries help me understand how do these things work. You look at a big company from the outside and sounds looks daunting and then you start taking apart and there’s all these different layers that help kind of bring it to that point. It’s not usually all about product. 

Leif Magnuson
A lot of the times it’s the company successful because they were able to get something manufactured cheaper than the competition or get a move from here to there and all that kind of stuff. So from there I started working in corporate for two years. Needed it. It was just incredibly boring and soul sucking and im sure a lot of founders kind of feel the same way. But from there I started a couple of marijuana companies that all failed. But I learned quite a few very good lessons along the way, especially like how not to be in business. Working with folks in that industry was a little rough. And then I eventually started consulting for restaurants and thats how I came across this idea in the first place. 

Brett
And what were you consulting restaurants on? What were they hiring you to do? 

Leif Magnuson
Initially? Yeah, so they, my first restaurant consulting job was from a restaurant group out of the Seattle area called for Ellis Pizza. Great pizza. If you get a chance to check that out, they called me into specifically improve the efficiency of their pizza making abilities, right. They had this new concept on the water. It was incredibly busy during the summer months. They couldn’t keep up with that production. So I tapped my lean manufacturing degree, education, if you will, and reduce the lead times on pizzas by 30%. Did a bunch of things in the kitchen that just made the process more efficient. So from there, after I crushed that, I basically upsold them. I was like, hey man, your technology stat is super old. What do you think about me engaging with you guys for another year, maybe two, upgrading that tech stack over time? 

Leif Magnuson
They bought it and we successfully deployed a new point of sale and all the derivative technologies from that, including calculation, which I didn’t even know existed at the time, that payroll, all those different elements. Luckily we did that too, because COVID hit not too long afterwards and they would have been hanged if they didn’t have the ability to sell online and manage all that stuff. 

Brett
Robert and then when did you stumble on this idea of tip management and how did you decide to make that the problem that you were going to solve? 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, so I really didn’t the idea for a long time. One of the things that I didn’t know it existed in the first place, we up to graded the point of sale, and then the restaurant leadership was like, well, we need to figure out what to do with tips. I’m like, what do you mean do with tips? Well, we distribute them in complex ways to make sure that if a server makes $100 on average, we’re giving up 25% of that to supporting staff. And it has to be done in a fair way. And they had a very specific way that they wanted to go about that. So I started vetting the different softwares out in the market. There were very few landed one, which I guess you could say was the leader at the point onboarded. 

Leif Magnuson
It was a terrible experience and it lacked a lot of things that I and the restaurant thought would just be logical things to have in a software that’s calling themselves a tip calculation management platform. Right. So they kind of begged me over the last four months to build the thing because they knew I was well connected with developers in Seattle and all that, at least had a little bit of a tech background, so that’s kind of how things came together. 

Brett
Then what happened after that? What were those? First, lets talk about maybe 1st 510 paying customers. How’d you end those deals, Josh yeah. 

Leif Magnuson
So I got pretty fortunate since I was consulting in this area and the restaurant group I was consulting for was fairly well connected. Theres a little bit of word of mouth, but we built the MVP over six months. I deployed it to Forellis. That was the deal. They would pay me for a few months to develop this for them. They give for free forever. I deployed it there and then I pulled in. Our first paying customer was a 30 unit restaurant chain, a local restaurant chain here in the northwest, which is a massive first customer, as you can imagine. We brought them in, and then about four or five months later, we brought in another 23 unit restaurant chain. So we had some big boys right away, we brought on that first customer. 

Leif Magnuson
It was like, okay, well, the product is good, but we needed to do X, Y, and Z. And, and then we started to really realize, okay, well, the MPP was pretty easy to put out, but there’s all these other things that are required. And every new customer that came on had requirements. We really had to figure out how to implement all these product enhancements in a way that didn’t deviate from what we thought the market was going to need in two, three, four years time, which was difficult, but we managed. 

Brett
Robert, what do you think that first restaurant chain, like 30 units, what did they see in you that they said, yep, let’s give you a shot. Let’s give you and your Co-Founder a shot. What did they see? 

Leif Magnuson
It came down to the product. At the end of the day, were able to match the price that they were currently paying to that competitor and beat their product. We were able to beat their functionality in six months. So that kind of gives you an idea of how underdeveloped the space was when we first entered it. For some reason, it was just overlooked. And I was sitting there before really putting a lot of time and effort into this industry in general. I was looking around, I noticed there were major scheduling software companies. Restaurants need to schedule their staff. Most businesses do. But restaurants, it’s a little bit more difficult. So theres like four major ones that are all venture backed and all that kind of stuff. 

Leif Magnuson
When I started looking at the TiF space, it seemed kind of small to me at first, but then I started realizing theres $90 billion of tips being generated in America. All those tips are being managed in some way, right? They don’t all go to the end, the server bartender or the recipient. Lets say, why isn’t there more infrastructure around this problem? And it just, at that point, I was like, well, it makes sense just going to develop a company around this that might seem kind of small and insignificant right now, but as time went on, it became we had this massive wave of customers leading their spreadsheets and things like that, the manual calculation stuff and moving over to a system like ours. 

Brett
Why do you think it was so underdeveloped? Because when you say that out loud it’s like wow, $90 billion market there, 90 billion in tips that’s being moved. It seems like a lot owners would have looked at that. Okay, it’s an obvious market to go after. How was it missed like that? 

Leif Magnuson
This is the conversation I have with VC’s every time I go out to raise and it’s the same conversation, but they’re always asking about other entrants coming in, what’s your mode, all that kind of stuff. And realistically it’s a far more complex problem than you would initially realize. It took us no joke about three years of constant development to get to the point where we could successfully walk into just about any restaurant in the nation and deploy our software in a way that made sense to them in their pre existing operations. Before that, if went to a customer and we said hey look, everything is perfect, and then the customer said hey look, well I need this one thing and we didn’t have it, that would kill the deal or would postpone the deal, they just wouldn’t move forward. 

Leif Magnuson
So its a very hard product to get to the point where you can sell it successfully. So theres a lot of investment and time and its not one of those things you can put ten devs on and expect them to come up with something good in a year even. It’s a highly iterative process, so that’s one thing. The other large mood around abroad itself is the simple fact we need to integrate with every existing point of sale. And scheduling software, which is pretty intensive, is one of the harder parts about starting a company in this space. And many other companies, software companies that rely on APIs in general, this one is just so segmented compared to other spaces that you have to have. 

Leif Magnuson
I mean there’s 20 plus point of sales that are all fairly popular in the United States and you have to integrate with each one. 

Brett
And if you look at the tip management space, is there like a giant, was there like an old legacy company that was just dominating this market or. 

Leif Magnuson
What is like there was, yeah, that was a gratuity solutions at the time, which is the one that I onboarded and disliked enough to create a competing solution against. But that was really it. There weren’t a lot of other companies out there doing it well, and when I say doing it well, like living and breathing, the problem right. There’s, there were companies out there that had a product in market, but it was like, you know, the ownership was not living and breathing this every day. And so there you can tell that it’s just, you know, the products were definitely suffering because of that. 

Brett
On your website I saw a really fun testimonial. It says, I can’t effing believe we ever operated without TipHaus. When she writes that, is she referring to like using other solutions or was the status quo for them and many other customers just doing this manually and doing it in spreadsheets? 

Leif Magnuson
Most customers, id say then still to this day, most customers are still in spreadsheet land. Its a highly manual process that you can imagine. So theres usually for a smaller organization, lets say just a single unit restaurant, theyll have a manager that at the end of the night or the GM end of the night or early morning will have to look at all the tips and figure out who gets what or payroll day. They have to reconcile all this stuff and go through all these spreadsheets, which they hate. Its like doing taxes every day or every pay period. And so by deploying the product, it’s fairly easy to get like significant wins early on, just by, hey look, this took me 1 minute instead of 30 minutes every day kind of thing. 

Brett
Yeah, and that’s a good point too. So every day is. 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. People hate it. I used to have to do it when I was consulting for the Corelli’s group and it was just mind melting stuff. 

Brett
Yeah, I have to imagine too. It’s pretty high stakes, right? If you’re doing that manually. Yeah, wrong. There’s some high stakes there. 

Leif Magnuson
Right, exactly. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you’d run, we’d run into that where it’s like, okay, we spent $100 extra home with this guy and it turns out you should have gone to somebody else. And then what? You can’t take that money back, so you have to pay out. It gets pretty expensive. You start making mistakes and it’s very easy to make mistakes. 

Brett
Do restaurant operators, do they get it right away? Like when you pitch this idea or they’re like, yes, thank God someone’s coming in with a real solution to this. Or do they view it as like a problem that they can live with? And you have to really agitate that pain and make them a bit more like problem aware. 

Leif Magnuson
Most of our customers, we have moved up market, you know, 510 plus restaurant chains that are usually higher revenue type operations like steak houses and things like that. Like they’re doing above seven or $8,000 a day in sales, they get it. They’re a well willed machine. They’ve got a, you know, they’ve got highly skilled operator. They might have raised some PE funding to expand their footprint over the next couple of years. So they’re dialed in and they understand any, you know, software that saves even five minutes a day of this person’s time and it costs x amount of dollars. You could do the math in your head and make it make sense. Right. When you start talking about some of these mom and pop type shops, they’re a little bit less inclined to like, create that Reasoning. 

Leif Magnuson
And so I’ve talked to some folks and like, well, I have no problem just doing this in spreadsheets. And I, it doesn’t happen very often, but that does happen with some of these smaller operators, for sure. 

Brett
Yeah, I can see that. I guess in that case, that’s probably not a target customer that you want anyways. 

Leif Magnuson
If there’s someone who’s willing to. No, exactly. Let somebody else take that one. 

Brett
Is the master plan here to keep going up market? Like, do you want this to be really an enterprise sale at some point, or do you want to really kind of be spread out and serve both mid market and enterprise? 

Leif Magnuson
So that’s a difficult question to answer just because we sell into enterprise right now. Like, we’ve got some enterprise customers that we just recently acquired this year. There were some tweaks and changes that needed to happen in the product in order to make that happen. There were some permissions and roles type stuff that we needed to figure out. But if this makes sense, if I sell to a 50 in a restaurant chain, which is technically SMB, and a 300 unit restaurant chain, it’s fairly similar. And a 300 unit restaurant chain, that’s an enterprise customer. And so there’s not a lot of differentiation as far as like the selling component is much different, but the actual product and the service and the customer support and all that kind of stuff is very similar. 

Leif Magnuson
And so we’re attacking both sides of it and so we’re not creating a differentiation between enterprise and the lower end of the market. 

Brett
Is the buyer different though, if you’re going mid market or SMB? Is it? 

Leif Magnuson
It is, yeah. And that’s what I was mentioning, that you have to tailor your sales process for the enterprise side of things. You know, it’s more presentation type stuff. You’re really, you’re less on the technical side of things and you’re more like, hey, how can I reduce the employee turnover? And what are the metrics behind that? And what are the use cases and what are your other customers and presenting that in a way that’s like easy enough for them to digest in a quick enough manner and then being able to propel that conversation. Because enterprise customers, sometimes it’s twelve months before, you know, from that first point of contact to the sale. And so it’s like, how do you get that first person you talk to kind of disseminate that information to other folks at the leadership table and all that kind of stuff? 

Leif Magnuson
That’s the hard part about the enterprise sales side. 

Brett
In enterprise sales, who’s that Persona that you’re really speaking to? Is it finance, is it HR, is it operations? I could see a case for probably all three of those who’s like that main buyer that you’re trying to engage and target. 

Leif Magnuson
So, I mean, yeah, it’s all of them. We’ll usually have one out of each one of those. They’ll either be operations, HR or CFO, seldom the CEO, but they’ve identified a problem that needs fixing, and one of them will reach out to us to kind of get the ball rolling from that first point of contact. So there’s usually one person that’s pretty keen on the idea of using something like this. It’s seldom like, do we have to convince them of the value, they usually have some value in their head that we need to kind of then understand ourselves and then double down on usually, and then get them to understand how, what are the other multitude of different things that we can do for their organization? 

Leif Magnuson
Like I mentioned, reducing employee turnover or increasing employee satisfaction, which doesn’t decrease turnover, but reducing the risk of getting sued. Right. There’s class action lawsuits all the time around the mismanagement of tips. And so those are the kinds of things that we try to, you know, but those are more well received by folks like a CFO. Right? If you’re talking to a three unit restaurant chain, that those are things that they’re more worried about, functionality. How does this help me right now? How much time does it save me, et cetera? 

Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Are there any numbers you can share that can help us understand the scale that you’re operating at today? 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, we’re just north of three mil and ARR. We are growing fairly quickly. We did three x this year, did three x the year before. So we’re kind of maintaining a fairly steady pace. You know, this industry’s not like, you know, it’s not like selling AI work and blow up 15 x in one year kind of thing. Right. Like, the flip side to that is that our products are stickier. So I’m super happy with our ability to continue this rate of growth, especially with the amount of funding that we brought on so far, just fairly limited. When you look at the competition in this space, what is having a dramatic impact on our revenue in general is our ability to move money. So we do the calculations, but then we had restaurants and all of our customers reaching out to us. 

Leif Magnuson
Hey, you do the calculations really well. We love you. Can you also move the money to my employees? Because we don’t have any cash anymore since COVID So we could have brought that to market over this past year, and that’s had a significant impact on our revenue. 

Brett
What do you attribute to your success and your growth? I’m sure there’s a lot of different things that you’ve gotten right over the last year or last couple of years. But if we had to pick one big thing, what do you think that thing would be? 

Leif Magnuson
That’s a difficult one. I think this is a winner for any company. It’s like, get rid of all the egos in the room and stay very close to the problem. If you want to get more grain or more direct with something that we did well, that I could attribute our success to, I would say, all right, so we service restaurants. Right? That’s hospitality. Hospitality has a very high degree of, they pride themselves on serving their customers. Right. And due to that, there’s a very high level of expectations around how they are serviced from their technology providers. 

Leif Magnuson
So early on, we decided to really spend a lot of time and money on the support of our customers in a way that they felt like, hey, if I want to get on the phone with a very knowledgeable rep at TipHaus, I can do that within five or ten minutes and talk to somebody on phone. So thats been the backbone of a lot of the reasons why you get so many referrals and people talking about us in a nice way that have propelled us into partnerships with point of sale systems and all that kind of stuff. 

Brett
And what about your market category? I know were chatting about this a little bit in the pre interview of what is TipHaus? Is it a tip distribution management platform? Is it a tip gratuity management platform? What is it? Or what do you want to be? Is maybe a better way to ask that question. 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, that is a good question though. What I see our company evolving into over the next few years is we’re dealing with the largest sales force in America. Right. Servers, bartenders, these folks that are working in restaurants trying to get people to effectively buy more food and have a good time around and all that kind of stuff. So I look at us as this incentivization engine or those salespeople, we’re the ones documenting how much commission they’re getting, that is tips. And so because of that and all the data that we have, we can do things to poke and prod and nudge these salespeople to do certain activities that generate higher revenue per hour for the restaurant, greater tips for themselves and thusly more money for us. Because were the ones making money off the distribution of these funds. 

Brett
What would you call that? Like a dream case? 

Leif Magnuson
I haven’t come up with a name for it yet. 

Brett
Well what do you think the marketing person can work on that day one? 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

Brett
Would it be like an incentive management? Is that like an easy way to summarize it or big restaurant? 

Leif Magnuson
Yes. Yeah, I’m hoping for something with a little more pop than that. 

Brett
Yeah, those sound like Gardner. 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah. Well if you think of anything you shoot me an email, right? 

Brett
Yeah of course. 

Leif Magnuson
Of course. 

Brett
Now I know you touched on that a little bit at the start of the interview, but I just want to ask a bit more about it or dive a bit deeper. So COVID, obviously some industries were really affected, restaurant industry was affected in a very major way. What was COVID like for you? Can you take us through that journey and what you learned from that and what you did to survive it? 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, it was super rough for us, as you could imagine. If theres nobody in the restaurant, theres no need for tip calculation. And plus none of the restaurants had any money for software anyways unless it was helping them sell to people like QR codes and all that kind of stuff. Those companies did really well. So we basically, went into COVID with $5,000 a month of revenue, I think it was, and we exited after twelve months with the same amount of revenue. This is like our first actual year of selling. Like, we incorporated in August 2019 and then COVID hit in March 2020. So it hit really soon after we just started getting our wheels underneath us. So I remember it was February. We sat leadership team. There’s four of us at the time, maybe five of us. 

Leif Magnuson
We sat down and we just came to a target. Like, hey, look, if the market, if COVID doesn’t release this graph on our throats within the next month, we’re going to throw in the towel. No joke. Like one month later, we started seeing an increase in sales. So it was like that close that were going to give up. But I mean, COVID could last. Like after that, you don’t know. We definitely couldn’t survive. None of us were getting any salaries and things like that. Just a rough time. 

Brett
Yeah. Yeah, sounds like. And I can imagine that. I think anyone in the restaurant tech space or hospitality tech space, they were hit especially hard, like you said. Yeah, you don’t have the wild swings like AI companies, but also it sounds like it’s a much more stable industry apart from things like COVID, it’s overall probably much more stable. 

Leif Magnuson
Very stable. Yeah. And I think COVID was a weird anomaly. But people have to eat at the end of the day, even during COVID I think only with 20% of restaurants went under. So the markets large enough that even during a downturn in the economy, as you’re selling a software to restaurants, it doesn’t affect you too much. 

Brett
Yeah, that makes sense. You’ve raised $8 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout the journey? 

Leif Magnuson
Oh, fundraising is fun. Some people like it. I despise it. I think the biggest takeaway, I’m slightly bitter about it just because it just, it’s very hard to convince folks of what you’re doing. And a lot of the times it’s completely outside of your control. Right. Due to macro elements, you’ll hear vc say certain things to you and then you’ll kind of have to take a step back and be like, well, is that really the reason why you passed or is it the macro environment? I just went through a fundraise three months ago or two months ago, lets say. And I was getting a lot of passes. We’ve got great metrics. Everything is really great on paper. We look like an amazing company to invest in, but they come back to me with these objectives. 

Leif Magnuson
And in the back of my mind, im like, I know you’re just hoarding cash because you know you’re not going to get your lp to give you more cash. Right. And that’s all that these guys are doing right now. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, you know, take it with a grain of salt. Like these guys don’t know very much about business in general. They pretend like they do and then they, you know, all this kind of stuff, but focus on your product and, you know, just really, you know, focus on your numbers and just, you know, do your thing and it’ll work out. Usually. 

Brett
This is probably one of the first times I’ve ever had someone answer that in a real way. Normally I get like, well, it’s all about relationships, Brett. You got to really focus on building. I appreciate you being Janet and honest about it. Your experience with fundraising. 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, they’re just so annoying. Yeah. You know, I was able to raise funds and I will say, in case my VC’s are listening, I was able to raise funds beginning of last year and I raised more funds from that same VC just about a month ago after I went to market and everything like that. And it worked out really well for a valuation perspective. Everything worked out for a captivity perspective, all that kind of stuff. But, you know, VC’s, there’s some really good ones out there and they’re not going to have. They all tell you they’re going to have a lot of value in other ways besides money. But that’s, you know, it’s not going to really move the needle for your business that much. 

Brett
So. 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, I don’t know. I guess what I’m saying is there’s some really good ones out there, too. 

Brett
Let’s imagine I come to you and I say, hey, I want to start a technology company. I want to sell into restaurants. Based on everything that you’ve learned so far, what would be the number one piece of advice you give me? 

Leif Magnuson
I don’t know if I would. Yeah, I would say don’t do it. Basically, there are a ton of companies that are starting up in the space right now over the past couple of years, since COVID I think. But it’s like it’s in the thousands. Right. And they’re all trying to sell and extract money from a restaurant. Restaurants have very low margins, as you’re probably aware. It’s not uncommon to find a large format restaurant making eight to 10% profit margins. Right. And so when you are trying to sell into that, especially on the SaaS side of things, you know, this restaurant is going to have a tech stack that they’re paying x amount of dollars for already and then you’re asking to add on to that. 

Leif Magnuson
Unless you’ve got something very compelling, it can be very hard to extract enough value from that customer in order to prop up a venture scale business. It’s just very hard to do. I’m not saying that they won’t engage with you, but you’re not going to charge the prices that you want. So you have to get very creative about extracting or creating revenues for yourself. That don’t mean that you’re charging the restaurant or tying yourself into revenue in some way. I guess. 

Brett
Do you ever worry about this whole tipping economy? And I keep reading articles about how at least in the US people are done with tipping, they’re burned out with tipping. They’re being asked everywhere. Do you ever worry that tipping is going to go away at some point and well become more like Sweden or Europe or somewhere else where tipping is not so common? 

Leif Magnuson
People always ask me that because obviously of a tipping company, but I don’t. Freakonomics has a really good podcast on the tipping psychology around tipping and all that kind of stuff. I wonder what they were able to do. And I tend to agree with the people like to tip, they complain about all that kind of stuff, but people like that interaction and that. I don’t know what it is, but they like that. You also have the other side is that servers really like getting tipped. Bartenders really like getting tipped. If you took away the ability for them to get tipped, theres no way that the restaurant would be able to support the wages that they expect. Most of the restaurants that you work with, the servers are making dollar 30 to dollar 40 an hour in tips. 

Leif Magnuson
How the heck are you going to be able to pay your servers that much money? It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see how we could ever get to that point. What if they change the laws all of a sudden? How does that work? Realistically? It would just be a mess. I’m seeing restaurants try to embark on things like Danny Myers over in New York doing a higher income for his folks. He went away from that eventually just because it didn’t really work. But every time we see increase in minimum wage in certain states, I hear all these restaurant tours say oh we’re going to do away with it, we’re going to get income, we’re going to do service charge, all that kind of stuff. 

Leif Magnuson
And then a few years later they get used to the new increase in minimum wage and they go back to what they were doing before. So I don’t think it’s ever going to change. I know it was kind of long winded, but we like long winded answers. 

Brett
Do you see this market also expanding outside of restaurants? The example I would have is I stole a glass of wine the other night on my white couch. I had to have a carpet cleaner come swipe my car with the iPad. And then he spins it around and like asks me for a tip. And like, he’s standing in my living room. I had to give him a tip. Like, could you sell into all the other types of people who are now doing tips that previously weren’t taking tips? 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, there’s definitely an issue with that kind of stuff. Fundamentally what happened there and the reason why everybody’s asking for tips is that all the technology providers, all the point of sales, right. They started enabling that. And once you allow your customers, you know, these service providers to enable it, they’re going to enable it. Like the business thinks that in their mind they’re like, okay, well, if I turn this on, I can generate, my employees can generate an additional $3 an hour on average for like a counter service type place. Right? Why wouldn’t you do that? As the owner of the business, it only makes sense. And it makes sense for the employees as well. 

Leif Magnuson
And so then we as the customers are left with the, I don’t know, the pressure of kind of like falling into societal norms in some way or figuring out what those norms are. But I think just it’s so new that we haven’t kind of figured out what is the norm. Like, if I go to mcdonalds, I don’t leave a tip. Right? They don’t ask for a tip either. But Starbucks started asking for tips too. Im paying $8 for coffee. Do I really need a tip on top of that? You never asked me before. So kind of figuring out how we want to do this moving forward, I don’t know where its going to end up, but I definitely don’t like it. 

Leif Magnuson
Jeff, one of the things that were seeing right now is I think this is a more positive note for tip acceptance, is hotels where your room service or house cleaning folks do a really good job or you want to leave a tip after your week in Cabo or something like that, scan a QR code and they get that, receive that money, which is kind of a nice thing. I think a lot of people would like to do that kind of thing. 

Brett
That’s an example of like a situation where you want to tip, but it’s very hard. As opposed to like, yeah, one or the ones that you described where it’s like, you don’t want to tip in that situation. You’ve never had a tip? No. You’re being asked here. You have to be the asshole to, like, check 0% and, like, you shouldn’t have to feel bad. 

Leif Magnuson
Yeah, you just stare them right in the eye. I love it. 

Brett
All right, final question for you before we wrap up here. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture of vision that you’re building? 

Leif Magnuson
I see ourselves being, like, the incentivization issue. So I plan on gamifying that experience to a point where I can kind of guide employees to be exceptional. What they do, they get very little guidance on from management in a restaurant situation in most 90% of cases. So I think that one of the values that we can add to those poS workers is pushing and prodding them to do the things that will make them more successful and better servers and make more money and all that kind of stuff. And then, as a tangent to that, over the next two years, we’re going to be working on pushing certain products where we’re incentivizing folks to sell certain things. When somebody asks for vodka soda, you might say, would you like a tito’s with that? 

Leif Magnuson
And then we might have a relationship with Tito’s to help kind of propagate that. And then they might win an award for something or get extra incentives on the back end for activities like that. So I feel like there’s a lot of things that we can do just simply by pushing people to ask certain questions at certain times and things like that. And since were intimately involved with these people’s lives, I think there’s a good chance we’ll be able to pull it off. Amazing. 

Brett
Love the vision. And we’ll have to bring you back on for part two in a couple of years to chat about that more. We are up on time. We’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders listening in, I want to follow along with your journey. Where should they go? 

Leif Magnuson
Follow me on LinkedIn or, yeah, connect with me. Send me a message. Leif Magnuson. 

Brett
Nice and easy. All right, man. I appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. 

Leif Magnuson
Thanks for having me, Brett. Have a good one, man. 

Brett
Yeah, you too. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.